FSM Newsletter 30th of October 2006

Welcome to another of Free Software Magazine’s fortnightly newsletters, keeping you up to date with us, and all things free software... enjoy!

General announcements

We have been implementing quite a lot of new features lately—and we have two fun new features for you this fortnight. Firstly, you may have noticed that we have added social bookmarking links at the bottom of each entry. You can use these to add a bookmark to your favourite social bookmarking site. This will help expose new people to the free software movement and help us grow in popularity. We have also added a recent comments panel on the right hand side of the page, which shows the entries that have been commented on most recently and will help to keep you alerted to current discussions.

Latest content

Secure VoIP calling, free software, and the right to privacy—David Sugar talks about the development of free software security for VoIP, and why that’s important. Read more...

Writing documents with OpenOffice.org Writer—because using a word processor isn’t enough.—Want more control over your documents? Marco Marongiu lets you know how to format them the way you want them formatted. Read more...

And now, onto something different—Copyright!—Been wanting to know more about that whole Firefox/Iceweasel malarkey? Mitch Meyran tells us all about it. Read more...

Latest content continued

Debian and Creative Commons—Do you find the whole issue a bit confusing? Terry Hancock may be able to help you out. Read more...

Interview with John “Maddog” Hall about LinuxWorld UK—Tony Mobily chats with John “Maddog” Hall. Read more...

Free software is a weak mode of production—The free software business model is for hippies—if you can even call it a business model. Or is it? Scott Carpenter talks us through it. Read more...

Latest book reviews released

AJAX and PHP: Building Responsive Web applications by Christian Darie, Bogdan Brinzarea and Flip Chereches-Tosa Trying to build more dynamic, active and interesting web content? Alan Berg looks at how this book could help you. Read more...

Moodle E-Learning Course Development by William H Rice IV Alan Berg looks at Moodle—one of the more popular free software Course Management Systems. Read more...

Please comment wherever possible and don’t forget to log in so that you’ll be in the running to win the latest book competition

Poll Results—What do you think we should call free software?

The results are in—with “free software” romping home with 54% of the votes. As was raised in the comments, this was not a surprising result—we are, after all, Free Software Magazine, and that means our audience is likely to be biased toward that name. We were more interested in how the other options faired. The 2nd place getter was no surprise either—“open source” on 38%. “FLOSS” (12%), “FOSS” (11%) and “libre software” (11%) came in neck-and-neck. But the real upset was “something else” coming in 3rd on 13%. Clearly there are plenty of our readers that think none of the current options are perfect. There was some great discussion and comments to this effect. Read more here and stay tuned for...

This fortnight’s poll

If we do a good job of extolling the virtues of free software to our friends and family, one of them is bound to ask for help sooner or later. Whether it be help with installation of a distro, getting MP3’s working, or getting a troublesome piece of hardware working, let us know how often you help new users out and share some of your experiences.

Remember, if you want to vote you must log in!

Reminders

Comments

Your comments on articles, issues, and blog entries are very welcome. They provide other readers with insightful suggestions, further information, and the feeling that they are not alone. They also provide our authors with the feeling that they are being heard. Please comment wherever possible and don’t forget to log in so that you’ll be in the running to win the latest book competition.

Avatars

Avatars are a great way of expressing your personal identity, whether it be a photo or an image that you feel represents the you you want to be. Read more about avatars here. To add an avatar: log in, go to “my account” in the menu on the left, go to the “edit” tab and scroll down to where it says “Upload picture”. Now, hit the browse button, find the image on your computer that you want to upload and go to the bottom of the page and hit the submit button. That’s it; you now have an avatar image.

Social Bookmarking

You can use the links at the bottom of each article to add bookmarks to your favourite social bookmarking site. This will help expose new people to the free software movement and help us grow in popularity.

Donate

As you might know already FSM is a low profit project with all funds raised going back into producing the fine magazine you can download for free.

Think about how much you would normally have to spend buying a magazine of this quality. We provide it for free!

Your donations will help us to continue spreading the word about free software and producing more fantastic issues.

Contacting us

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Thanks

Thank you for subscribing to Free Software Magazine. You are a part of a growing community who help to raise the awareness of, and educate new users in, the joys of free software. Without you we would not have this community and without you we would not have a magazine. Happy reading!

License

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.